Just a brief reply about SyncEvolution

Posted on 2011-09-17 by matej

Author of the SyncEvolution commented on mine and Adam Williamson´s blogpost about problems with synchronization. Patrick asks in his post: “I’m not sure what kind of problem Matěj had with SyncEvolution. He doesn’t say in his blog post, only that it does not allow him to reliably sync with his server running Zarafa.” I am sorry for mixing two stories up.

Of course, I know that syncevolution uses SyncML and Zarafa ActiveSync (or CalDAV/CardDAV). My problems with syncevolution were much earlier when I was trying to sync my phone (then Nokia 3110 Classic, later Nokia N900) with Evolution, which given the name of the application should be doable. Maybe it was the horrible configuration, or some kind of PEBKAC, but I was never able to make it working correctly.

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What have the EventEmitter framework ever done for us?

Posted on 2011-08-31 by matej

So, I was one of the people behind the bug request which lead to the EventEmitter framework.

So, when I have now a moment I was looking at my scripts how to make to use it. The situation before was that I had this pageMod creator:

  pageMod.PageMod({
    include : interestingURLsArray,
    contentScriptWhen : 'ready',
    contentScriptFile : contentScriptLibraries,
    onAttach : function onAttach(worker, msg) {
      worker.on('message', function(msg) {
        messageHandler(worker, msg);
      });
  });

and messageHandler handler was just one very ugly switch(msg.cmd) which contained sections like:

  case "GetURL":
    libbz.getURL(msg.data.url,
        function(stuff) {
          worker.postMessage(new Message(msg.data.backMessage,
              stuff));
        });
    break;

Not nice but useable. All the ugly switching logic was hidden behind the corner and it was obvious what it does. Now with the advent of EventEmitter framework I should change my pageMod’s onAttach handler to contain endless list of very ugly spaghetti calls like:

      worker.port.on('GetURL', function (command) {
        libbz.getURL(command.url,
          function(stuff) {
            worker.port.emit(command.backMessage,
                stuff);
          });
      });

What is the advantage? What have the EventEmitter framework ever done for us? I am not sure I know what is the answer,

I guess we could improve the situation a bit if page.PageMod creator was actually returning an instance variable and event handlers could be hooked on it (in the similar pattern as the Widget’s on the instance variable. Why it isn’t possible to do so with PageMod?

Posted in computer, jetpack | Leave a comment

Just a thought …

Posted on 2011-08-20 by matej

If you are doing a web game in Flash (then don’t and write it in something more reasonable, but anyway) for little kids who are suspect of not being able to read, don’t interrupt the game with marketing questions (“Do you like the game? (Yes/No)”. Seems obvious, right?

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Is there a better decentralized “Like” than status.net?

Posted on 2011-05-31 by matej

So, I was reading through my daily avalanche of blogposts and emails and various links from various sources, and I was thinking about my current obsession: decentralized clouds. And on each webpage I read (for example on this beautiful article from Slate) I saw “Like” button. Of course, given it comes from Facebook, “Like” button is an evil scheme to collect information to be sold later. So, the fact I cannot be tempted into pressing it is one of nice consequences (originally unintended) of me not having a Facebook account at all.

However, looking at those pages today I felt very strongly need for something like “Like” button. Something to say to my friends (however we define them) “Hey, this is a great reading, go and read it! What do you think?”. When thinking about it, I’ve made an inventory of resources I have. Email and plain Jabber are out (it is not cool IMHO to spam everybody in my address book or roster), Facebook (where I don’t even have an account) and Twitter (where I am present at least read-only) are too centralized to support them wholeheartedly. So the only thing which remains are decentralized social networks like Status.net (mostly identi.ca), OneSocialWeb, or Diaspora. Unfortunately, from these only status.net looks like having real life so far. Fortunately, it shouldn’t matter that much, because if Diaspora and OneSocialWeb (and GNU/Social, and Appleseed, and …) all follow unified standards (which I am not sure they do) it wouldn’t matter that much which implementation of protocols you use.

Given this inventory, I am afraid status.net is the only currently available solution with substantial following, so I will concentrate on it. So, I have sent my links and comments to identi.ca with a bit of comment, and started to think how better status.net could be if it actually expected to be used for like-equivalent functionality. For example, it would be nice to get all links (or only links from today) mentioning some particular URL (after expansion of all shortening URLs, of course) with notices mentioning to collect crowd opinion on it. I guess this is something similar to Gina Trapani’s Think Up. (few moments later) No, it isn’t. I didn’t mean purely data mining thing.

Anybody any thoughts in this direction of decentralized “Like”? (of course, it would be also nice to have some tool, perhaps Firefox extension?, to send commented link from the page which I actually read).

While looking for the resources for this post, I found freelish.us. I am not sure whether this is what I want … for example I am not sure whether it shares roster with my identi.ca account. What I really don’t want is to build my roster again from scratch. I should research what it is about.

Posted in computer, Own cloud, xmpp | 1 Comment

Gnome 3 and key shortcuts

Posted on 2011-05-15 by matej

One of the things which surprised me very much when using Gnome-shell on regular basis (which I have been doing with interruptions for more than the last year) is how pleasant experience is to use Gnome-shell for rodent haters. As I am used to the trend that software tends to move from useful to shiny and “cool” (the last word is meant to be an offense), I was surprised to find out that I actually use the rodent less than I used to with Gnome 2 and Metacity.

Of course, Gnome-shell in Fedora 15 is version 1.0 so there are some obvious bugs present. For one, I haven’t found a way how to do assignment of a custom key shortcut to a menu item (in Gnome 2 you would just print the short cut with the menu item selected)
Which 'Z' wins?
Well, for second, what will happen when I press Alt+Z now? :)

Posted in computer | 8 Comments

bugzilla-triage-scripts 1.0RC1, please, test

Posted on 2011-05-10 by matej

Hi, all my beloved BugZappers!

If you have Firefox >= 4.0.1 (either in Fedora 15, from remi repo, (apparently spot’s F13/F14 repo at repos.fedorapeople.org doesn’t have it yet), or using the upstream binary), please try to install the 1.0RC1 version of the script and let me know how it works for you.

If you encounter ANY issues (or you have some requests for enhancements), please, let me know at (in declining level of awesomeness):

I will try to fix all issues ASAP, and if nothing very serious happens to release 1.0 in a week or so.

{originally posted as email to test@lists.fp.o}

Posted in bugTriage, computer, jetpack | Leave a comment

Synchronization sucks!

Posted on 2011-04-14 by matej

One of my biggest pet-peeves in the free software world hit me again. Whenever I asked my friends what are their biggest blockers against switching to Linux, I get two questions. The first one is “Will my Word documents work? Will I get something equivalent to MS Office?” And I am happy to say that I can point to Libre/OpenOffice and with a kind help from our friends in Redmont, I usually can persuade them that we have a good alternative here.

The second question is though “Will it synchronize calendar/addressbook with my cell phone?” and there I get always sad. Given the frequency this question comes up and up again, I am constantly surprised how little major Linux players do in this regard. The last time synchronization reliably worked for me was when I was using Psion PDA and {KDE,Gnome}-pilot. Not that there wouldn’t be enough trying (OpenSync, SyncEvolution mentioned by Adam and many others), but none of them is really reliably allowing me to share my contacts, calendar, and TODO list between my N900, Thunderbird on desktop and my server (which runs Zarafa 7.0beta3 currently). Currently the only working solution for me is to use … ehm … ActiveSync from above mentioned friends on the west Coast of the United States. Yes, it is quite unreliable (especially with regards to emails) and it omits synchronization of contacts in Thundebird, but at least I have calendars more or less in sync.

In relation to the recent news I have chatted on IRC with Ludovico and we agreed that actually well working Lightning and Address book synchronization/sharing is must for any serious deployment outside of hobbyist area.

And now I am reading Adam’s blogpost on his suffering with the state of synchronization and I feel at least a bit of consolation that I am not alone with my pain. I cannot add much to his blogpost than couple of nits:

  • I am not completely persuaded that synchronization is not the way to go, or that the difference isn’t mostly lexical. At least git seems to show that synchronization of two repositories is possible, and synchronization of changes from cache to the central repository doesn’t seem to be too different from synchronization.
  • I am not sure how reliable the information is, but some birdie told me that the next version of Zarafa (after 7.0) should have the official support for CardDAV (CalDAV is already supported) and I really hope it will be so.

I still hope that future is bright, but I really wish it was closer than it is.

Posted in computer | 17 Comments

Gnome 3.0 is out! Whoopee!

Posted on 2011-04-07 by matej

(except it has been part of Fedora 15 for some time already). It is crazy, it is radically new, and I like it more than I expected. Try it!
Gnome 3.0 in reality

Posted in computer | 2 Comments

Llullaillaco FTW!

Posted on 2011-04-05 by matej

Just so that other name won’t win!

Second and third post go to Bonnet and Verne. I could imagine nice 19th century artwork for it. When looking for examples, I was again surprised how great are proposals for the Fedora artwork and how bland and boring are then quite often final results. Look at Fedora 12 proposals. Almost any of these would be better than the result. Or this beautiful Fedora 10 Golden Gears background:

F10 Art work

And in the end we had something boring again. Why?

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Hello, WordPress

Posted on 2011-04-01 by matej

I had always a problem with WordPress. On the one hand it is the right tool to use (comparing to my previous use of blogger, quite certainly better), but some things were just hard to swallow. I dream about using AtomPub for my posting, but then I hit this bug and it suddenly is not possible to post HTML to WordPress without having it molested to awful mess (see also this post which seems to vent a similar frustration).

Today I have decided that I am either part of the problem or part of the solution, and it is hard to deal with this issue, if I am not using it (see also this post about my troubles with Atompub). So, my home server is now (among other things) running WordPress.

I have still some problems and SELinux is not happy (something about symlinks and MySQL), but generally it works and when I switched off Visual Editor and allowed Raw HTML, it seems like a workable solution.

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